The present invention generally relates to remanufacturing and repairing replaceable imaging components, and more particularly to techniques for remanufacturing a replaceable imaging cartridge such as a toner cartridge or inkjet cartridge including a memory element.
In the imaging industry, there is a growing market for the remanufacture and refurbishing of various types of replaceable imaging components such as toner cartridges, ink cartridges, and the like. Toner cartridges, once spent, are unusable for their originally intended purpose. Without a refurbishing process, they would simply be discarded, even though the cartridge itself may still have potential life. As a result, techniques have been developed specifically to address this issue. These processes may entail, for example, the disassembly of the various structures of the cartridge, replacing toner or ink, cleaning, adjusting or replacing any worn components and reassembling the cartridge.
Some toner cartridges may include a chip having a memory device which is used to store data related to the cartridge or the imaging device, such as a printer, for example. The printer reads this data to determine certain printing parameters and communicate information to the user. For example, the memory may store the model number of the cartridge so that the printer may recognize the cartridge as one which is compatible with that particular printer. Additionally, by way of example, the cartridge memory may store the number of pages that can be expected to be printed from the cartridge during a life cycle of the cartridge and other useful data. The printer may also write certain data to the memory device, such as the amount of toner remaining in the cartridge. Other data stored in the cartridge may relate to the usage history of the toner cartridge. Thus, it would be advantageous to provide systems and methods for reading and analyzing the data stored in the cartridge memory to assist in the process of remanufacturing the toner cartridge.